MensXP's Bollywood Movie Review: Gori Tere Pyaar Mein (2013)

Rating: 3.5/5

Review:

This is Bollywood candy floss at its best - fluffy, sugary, pretty and pink. You cannot go to watch ‘Gori Tere Pyaar Mein’ and take it seriously. What you will take seriously is that Punit Malhotra cannot make romcoms. At all. He aims for Karan Johar-ish material, but falls short hopelessly.

Too many songs and dances that are not peppy enough. Many costume changes and dressed up backdrops that fail to mesmerize. Metatextual references fall too.

The lead pair of Kareena Kapoor and Imran Khan is good-looking, but look uninterested and passionless. They smile, serenade and smirk without any conviction.

And if his directorial duties wasn’t enough, he even doubles as writer to assist Arshad Syed for the screenplay and dialogue, penning the most tiring and insipid lines ever. Even his lame tricks at borrowing fun lines/instances from Bollywood hit romances isn’t novel or noteworthy.

His love story is set in a terrain unbecoming of Karan’s lavish backdrops - with cow dung and dust playing prominent parts in this romance.

Punit’s crab-consulting Romeo is fair-skinned and polished enough to remove any trace of his Tamilian bloodline, while his Juliet is (also) fair-skinned and spirited to make a social makeover in a rustic village.

Their skin tones, which would’ve otherwise gone unnoticed, is often highlighted, some times in the most inappropriate manner, to drill home the point that South Indians and the downtrodden can only be dark-skinned.

They fall in love, over one wedding song and numerous social revolts. Their parents play the stereotypical mom-dads, each emphasizing Bollywood's North-South divide. The Punjabis are loud, while the Tamilians speak in a weird twang with a white powder smeared on their foreheads. The only liberating change, if you can call it one, is that both are rich.

The lovers split because their ideologies do not gel. One’s a hardcore socialist, while the other a self-confessed lazy-bum.

After a few hiccups, which unfold in a rustic village separated from the world by a shaky rope bridge, they unite in “happily ever after”.

Imran Khan does either of the three things in the movie – sleepwalks, use his eyebrows to emote or take to his Ray bans to make up for his lack of performance.

Kareena Kapoor Khan breezes through as the feisty Dia Sharma, who picks any, and every, issue to revolt against. How she manages to fight for issues and still look like million dollars in her snazzy outfits and manicured nails is anybody’s guess. Probably that’s why she believes that merely building a bridge will solve an entire village’s problems.

Newbies Shraddha Kapoor and Esha Gupta are part of this messy affair, but no one’s got time to look at their mistakes in the grander scheme of things.